


Call You Home

by the north has risen (inwhispersandscreams)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, au!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-03 10:46:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inwhispersandscreams/pseuds/the%20north%20has%20risen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are the last. They are the North.<br/>And the North cannot love the Southron lords who've taken it all from them, for they love the winter, and the winter is them.<br/>A short (?) AU! Robb/Sansa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i.

The last thought in his mind when they advance upon him was not of the blades in their hands, it was of his family; of his mother, lying not ten foot from him in a scarlet pool of her cooling blood, of his father, beheaded by the Lannisters, of tiny Rickon and curious Bran – and then of his sisters. Of Arya, with the wildness of the North inside of her, and Sansa, their Septa’s pride, so pretty and dainty and neat. The Northern men had marched south to reclaim what the North had lost, to reclaim his father’s bones, the Stark sword and his sisters; there had never been any doubt that they would reclaim them. They would bring his sisters home, and in doing so, reject the Southron lords that had taken his father’s head and never be beholden to them again.

But he wouldn’t. The Freys had killed his bannermen, sliced and cleaved them in two, opened his mother’s throat in a bloody smile, and now they advanced towards him to end the dead, to splash a little more Northern blood onto the stone floors.

Curse them all. Curse all the Southerners.

He’d just wanted to bring his sisters home, back to Winterfell.

_And now they will become the Lannister bitch’s prisoners. Oh Sansa, Arya, I’m sorry, so sorry._

The Northern crown topples from his head as the Freys brought the Young Wolf down.

 

The Freys keep him like they would an animal, chained and starved, barely alive but nearer to dead, bowed and bent and broken in their dungeons. They faked his death, that much Robb knew, sewed Grey Wind’s head onto the body of a Northman similar to his size and age he was told, but as to their purpose, he had little idea. He could wage wars on a battlefield, where blood seeped into the ground and turned the rivers red, but the wars played in letters and social graces escape him. The Boltons, he learns through the idle chatter of his guards – sworn to secrecy and silence as to his presence, to his _life_ – have taken Winterfell, the North claimed, and the Freys have the Riverlands through marriage. He has no more purpose, the King in the North without a crown, the Young Wolf without a wolf, but they keep him still.

He doesn’t see Lord Frey, or any of his kin, too lowly now to be worth their time or appearance. He could offer them nothing that they wanted, but had he anything to offer, he would have given it gladly, for the guards bring news of his sisters, of the gold cloaks hunting for Arya, but finding not a hide or hair of her – _another Stark dead. Easy to kill, ain’t you?_ – and of his lone remaining kin’s engagement. Robb could picture it in his head; Sansa in a gown of blue to bring out the Tully red in her hair, and milk white colour of her skin, and a white maiden’s cloak trimmed with furs from the North, that much he had always known, simply from listening to Arya’s mutterings of the gossip between Jeyne Poole and her sister. But there would be no knight or lordling to unclasp the maiden’s cloak from Sansa’s throat and give her his own. Instead, there would only be an imp, stunted and deformed, reaching and jumping to humiliate his sister while the green eyed bitch Cersei looked on.

 _It would never have happened, if I had not lost_.

If the Young Wolf had not fallen, he would have continued south. If the Young Wolf had not fallen, he would have conquered the Riverlands, bested Tywin Lannister, and Cersei would not have dared to have wed his sister to the likes of Tyrion. But he had lost, lost in a game he hadn’t even known he played. For the guards had brought news about his Jeyne too. _Whole house pardoned by the Iron Throne, and given a seat. You don’t get a seat for nothing with the Lannisters, boy,_ the guard had said, _and a woman doesn’t just fall into a boy’s arms for nothing either._

He wanted to draw his sword and run them through at the words, but the wound in his chest ached and bled when he went to move, scab cracking to release blood on the dirtied bandages that bound the gash. He was lucky to be alive the Maester had said, as he had sown together skin with needle and thread. In the shadowy light, consciousness fading in and out with the agony of the wound lashing through his mind like lightning, Robb had thought that the maester had been his mother and sister, and he the stitching that so often had sat across their laps. But he was a Stark, and a Northerner besides – they were hard to kill, and he had survived, breathing in slow breaths to muster against the constant ache in his chest.

The Freys had kept him alive, but Robb felt so much closer to being dead.

 

He went from boy to man on the battlefield, but in the Frey dungeons, he returns to the boy – skinny and pale, confused and alone. The muscles that cleaved a man’s head from his shoulders could no longer do such a thing, and Robb mourns their loss in his prison. Before he was imprisoned by his pain, the weeping wound, but now he is imprisoned by his lack of strength. He cannot defeat the guards on his cell, nor any of the bandits and criminals that range the country shattered by his rebellion. His hair grows wild, snagging and tangling in itself whilst his muscles are stripped away by hunger and lack of use. Bones show through the flesh, but the wound, at least, heals. The maester sees him, and under the maester’s watch, the wound does not fester or blacken. Death, it seems, will not come for the last of the Stark name, and Robb is forced to watch the days pass by in a cell that smells of urine and decay, and contemplate how far his inaptitude in the subtle games of war have brought him down.

Days pass. The king is wed, and then, the king is dead. Tommen takes the throne, and his brother’s widow whilst the Queen Regent walks through Kings Landing as naked as the day she was born to the jeers of her beleaguered people. And there are whispers, more insistently spoken each time Robb hears them, of _dragons_ , of a Targaryen across the Narrow Sea, waiting to come and raze the Seven Kingdoms to the ground with her army of mythic creatures. Those whispers are repeated day in and day out outside his cage, but there are others to – whispers of the wall, of his bastard brother commanding it, of Stannis and the Greyjoys, of an Arya Stark wedding the Bolton’s bastard, though Robb holds the whisper in thought for a moment. Arya, skinny little thing she is, was lost and yet, there was no whisper of her being found that reached him, and what Arya Stark would meekly accept her marriage and wear her maiden’s cloak? _Not my sister,_ Robb thinks, _just a Lannister’s lie_ , and so it goes the same way as all the other words the guards bring him - it travels through Robb’s ears, but then out of them He has no need for that information anymore. In his cell, he will spend the rest of his days, rotting and decaying whilst still alive, waiting for the day that the Freys realise his use is gone and spent, and finish the job that Roose Bolton began.

But they do not, and the days continue to pass. If the whispers are true, Robb cannot say, but no dragons raze the Twins to the ground and free him.

 

His purpose, Robb discovers, is his name. _Stark_. A chance of birth is the reason for his continued life, no matter how cold and hungry and bleak that life has become. _There must always be a Stark in Winterfell_ , he had said to Bran, and now the words come back to haunt him. There is no Stark in Winterfell, only a Bolton, and the North grows rowdy with an imposter sitting in what should be a Stark’s seat. They swell the army of Stannis Baratheon to take back Winterfell, leaping at the chance to rebel against the Iron Throne that took Eddard Stark’s head and the life of his sons. _The North remembers_ , Robb thinks in his cell, _it doesn’t care a spit about the King’s peace and the King’s men. It wants justice for my father’s head and my brothers’ lives. It wants my sisters home, and a Stark in Winterfell, not a_ Bolton _._

He discovers his purpose when Ser Kevan Lannister comes to his cage, a crease in his brow as he breathes in the stench of the cell that Robb has grown long used to. “Bring him,” he orders to the guards, and for the first time, the cage door swings open, creaking and screeching – and stays open. “Maybe he can avert this war before Cersei destroys us all.”


	2. ii.

The first time that he sees his reflection, Robb wasn’t sure it was his own face that was mirrored back to him. The curling hair that once shone the Tully auburn is dulled and lies as a matted mess over his face. Grime and dirt has marked his face and stains the hollows where full cheeks used to sit. If he was a boy when he marched south, and a man when he captured the Kingslayer, then the reverse has happened – he is no longer the man, and not even the boy, regressed in his prison to not even be a man of flesh and blood. He is a fool who speaks in a hoarse voice when he can be moved to speak at all, and a poor reflection of the North that he once ruled. _The King of the North_ , he says in his head, but the words are laced with callous tone and jeering spite that not even the Imp could rival. _King of Nothing but air._ The North belongs to the Boltons, to the South, to the Lannisters, and he’ll be damned before he helps them claim it for their own. The North belongs to the Starks and their bannermen, no matter who has won the damned war – the North belongs to the Northerners.

But as much as he hates the Lannisters, this much is true – if not for them, he would still be in his cage, stale air swirling in his lungs, gruel and weak broth his only foods. For that, he gives them grudging respect, counts a point in their favour, and then takes them all away again as he thinks of the assassin sent to kill Bran and the bloody maw of Summer, of the fall that crippled his brother, of the swing of an executioner’s blade that separated his father’s head from his shoulders, the loss of Arya, still nowhere to be found – _she’s not married to the Bolton bastard, she’s not married to him, she would never be married to him_ – and the Gods knew only what had happened to Sansa. For a few moments, he feels fear at the thought of Sansa in Kings Landing, at the mercy of the cunt Joffrey, a vengeful and prideful King who has the power to sever heads from shoulders with a word, and his heart beats painfully hard in his chest. _She’s all I have left; I’ll not see her die, I can’t see her dead too, I can’t be the last Stark_ is the thought that echoes in his head in those moments, abiding only with the memory and happy realisation of Joffrey’s death. _Killed at his wedding._ It seems to Robb that weddings have become bloody, deadly things, a world apart from his marriage to Jeyne, so simple and sparing and _alive_.

_But a lie_. His Jeyne is no longer his – she now belongs to some Lannister bastard’s, and all too eager to shuck off her ties to him, or so the guards had said. He traded his sisters, his last remaining kin, Sansa - sweet, gentle _Sansa_ – for a woman who’d lain with him only to see his kingdom fall around him. He should have known, for what girl laid with the man who had taken her home from her, least to seek her revenge, to trap him with his own sense of honour, instilled in him by his father, the ever noble Eddard Stark himself? She’d never seemed like the type, so afraid and timid of Grey Wind, so gentle and demure, a proper lady, a woman that Sansa would have sought the company of eagerly, but now his recollection of her was coloured by the guards’ words. _A woman doesn’t just fall into a boy’s arms for nothing either_ , they’d said, and in his head Robb answers them. _No_ , he says _, but she will for a kingdom, for a crown and for my defeat._ He should have just left her behind after the deed was done, been like any soldier or captain or commander and be damned with her honour – it was a war, and there was no honour in killing a woman’s son and a man’s brother, but he was a Stark of Winterfell, and he had his father’s sense of honour, so he’d traded his honour for hers, and the world had tumbled down around him.

There was no more King of the North, no more honour, and no more protection for Sansa in Kings Landing. There was nothing but an honourless boy without a sword, without a wolf, and without his sisters or his home.

 

The war goes on. It is not the quick, bloody work that reduced the war of five kings to a war of two – it is longer, and more perilous. Their enemies would wait years to slice off a legion of blonde Lannister heads, and not act with foolishness as the Baratheon brothers, or with childish recklessness as Robb Stark. Ser Kevan Lannister inclines his head towards the once King, and is forced to reassess his title of boy to the man before him. Robb Stark is bowed and bent and broken, but he speaks not a word about it, not when the Lannisters are near, and that’s a man’s courage and a man’s pride in him. _War has made him old_ , he thinks, but it has made them all old. The young are now old, and the old now wizened crones with missing teeth. _And there’s still a long war to be fought yet._

Daenerys Targaryen – Stormborn, Mother of Dragons, Conqueror of the Slave Cities – hovers over the seas, calling men to her with the claim that she will take what is hers, will cross the seas and take the Iron Throne with her dragons, roasting men and women alike as if she were Aegon the Conqueror come again. The North breeds rebellion like an open wound. The Martells in Dorne are silent and secretive, and with news of Myrcella’s injury, it breeds only more suspicion, while the Tyrells show more thorns than flowers in the aftermath of Cersei’s claims of adultry and treason. The nets are closing around them, Kevan fears, tighter and tighter, and all those caught within them will be choked before long, unless he can tame them. It is in these moments, when he is allowed to contemplate the vastness of the threat surrounding him, that Kevan wishes for his nephew to return. _The Imp_ , they called him, and looked down on him with open derision, but Kevan will not deny that Tyrion kept Kings Landing afloat whilst it was under the grip of Cersei and her vengeful nature. But the Imp has fled, with his guilt weighing down on him, and Kevan brushes aside the momentary want to have his nephew, with his cunning mind that could help to battle the numerous approaching foes, here. The Imp is a kinslayer, and not to be trusted. Varys is not to be trusted either, and the number of allies to the Lannisters seems to plummet in his mind. _This is the only way._ His eyes are on the bent figure of Robb Stark, and knows with certainty that this _must_ work, or they will all die – starve or burn or perish by the blade – before winter has reached its end.

Travel is slow. Kevan dares not bring a litter to hurry the process, and dares not push Robb Stark to walk to his collapse. The man is the one tentative offering that the Lannisters can make to the rebellious North, and the one lord that the North will bend their knee to. Without the Northern lords flocking to Stannis’ banner with cries for vengeance and retribution on their tongues ( _it’s too much like the Dragon’s words, fire and blood_ , he thinks, and then shudders at the looming threat of Daenerys Stormborn and her wild dragons), Stannis will crumble beneath the debt to the Iron Bank and slink away to his hold of Dragonstone ( _he must, he cannot continue this folly with no army to his name_ ). An alliance between the west and the north will force the Tyrells to reveal their flowers, rather than their barbs, and then Kevan can face the threat across the water, of the Martells in Dorne and the dragons and a child’s army. His one idea hinges on this bowed and broken man – _please do not have your father’s sense of honour Robb, let it have died and rotted with you in that cell_ – and Cersei’s agreement to it. Kevan is no fool – he knows her agreement will not come easily, if at all. She will spit at him and throw her cup of wine into his face, but that was before her pride was torn with her. His lips curl and twist downwards at the thought of his niece’s penance walk, but he cannot deny its timing – the moment is opportune. He must move quickly, before the Faith sees fit to release her, act quickly before she can halt the progress he makes and undo it with crazed words and spite and lies.

The broken man who walks behind him with a limp and a bowed back will not oppose him, not while Sansa still rests in Kings Landing, innocent of Joffrey’s death but not above suspicion ( _anyone who is not us is an enemy, how many times has he heard those words?_ ), and in the absence of Cersei, he has all the room he needs.

 

They send for her later than she expected, waiting for what feels like months as she stays inside, hands brushing against the ridges and puckered tissue that mars her ruined face. They all used to say that she would have her mother’s beauty when she was grown, tall and golden and magnificent, but the memory is bitter to behold as her face is. She is not beautiful anymore, and will never be again – a blade has taken an ear from her face and cut across her cheek, and despite the ministrations of the maester, her mouth turns down in a constant scowl, and the flesh of her face, once so smooth and pale and _pristine,_ is a vengeful red, the scar jagged and wicked to behold. Were she a boy, like Tommen or Joffrey, she might have been able to wear the scar with pride, but she is a girl, and her beauty is gone like a summer flower.

_I look like Shireen,_ she thinks, and there is both pity and loathing in the thought.

Arianne gives her veils of fine gold at her request, and she dons them like an armour, a shield from the world. She rides out only in litters with thick heavy curtains to obscure her from view. Myrcella hides her face and hides her shame, and she waits for her mother to send for her, to take her home. She wants her mother’s embrace, wants her mother’s tears to join her own, wants to hear her mother’s words and be far away from this place. Though it is warm here and the breeze blows the scent of exotic flowers to her, Dorne seems cold and cruel and inhospitable now that a blade has taken her beauty from her. Any day now, she thinks, the letter will come, attached to a black crow and it will read _we come to take our Princess home._

But it doesn’t come, not for a long, long time. But when it does, it comes with Uncle Kevan’s named signed to it, and a short missive that reads only _Myrcella must return to Kings Landing immediately for her wedding_.

Her head bows as she takes in the news, and her fingers play with the hem of her veil. What lord will take her now, with this scar upon her face? _None_ , her mind answers back, in the voice of her mother – _which is why he will not see until he has unclasped your maiden’s cloak and said the vows._

The veil is her armour, and beneath it, she turns herself to steel so she can approach her wedding day and endure her lord husband’s gaze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is so much later than I had hoped to get it up, and tbqh, I'm not 100% happy with it. That said, CYH is becoming much longer than I anticipated it would be and more stuff is happening and hopefully, the chapters will become longer and more frequently updated. Until then, let's just... not kill me. Unbeta-d, but I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
